Too strict a recipe would have spoiled the charm of this layer cake of nested memories and family legends, which have been arranged with painstaking haphazardness ... Chabon constructs a loving, partial portrait of an unlikely, volatile and durable marriage ... He brings the world of his grandparents to life in language that seems to partake of their essences ... Whatever else it is — a novel, a memoir, a pack of lies, a mishmash — this book is beautiful.
Moonglow is a wondrous book that celebrates the power of family bonds and the slipperiness of memory ... [The] fusion of history, slapstick and menace sets the trajectory for the rest of this lovable novel ... This is Chabon at his magical best, stitching his grandfather into the fabric of the 20th century in a way that seems either ludicrous or plausible depending on how the light hits ... a thoroughly enchanting story about the circuitous path that a life follows, about the accidents that redirect it, and about the secrets that can be felt but never seen, like the dark matter at the center of every family’s cosmos.
...the novel’s faux-memoir style is so thoroughly executed that it often lacks the shape of realism as Chabon goes for the shapelessness of the real ... for much of the time I was reading Moonglow, Chabon had me convinced I was reading a lightly embellished memoir. The rigor of his mimicking memoir is impressive but the metafiction is misbegotten. Part of the trouble has to do with the stiflingly nostalgic tone Chabon strikes by referring to his two main characters as 'my grandfather' and 'my grandmother' ... The paradoxical result of all this is an intermittently brilliant work of fiction buried under what reads like a bloated and often turgidly written memoir. Moonglow has pushed Chabon’s project of fusion to a breaking point. He invented a rocket of a story, but the book he put it in never achieves escape velocity.
...a flamboyantly imaginative work of fiction dressed in the sheep’s clothing of autobiography ... though Moonglow plays some light postmodernist tricks with the line between fiction and autobiography, it sincerely exalts the era as an American Age of Heroes, a time of marvels and portents, valor and tragedy ... Prose is still Mr. Chabon’s best tool of persuasion. But the troubled figure of the grandmother, a refugee who arrives in the U.S. with a small daughter and a numbered tattoo on her forearm, is what makes Moonglow his most confident and complex performance ... a movingly bittersweet novel that balances wonder with lamentation.
...elegiac and deeply poignant ... Mr. Chabon weaves these knotted-together tales together into a tapestry that’s as complicated, beautiful and flawed as an antique carpet. The novel would have benefited from some rigorous editing...But the fraying story lines seem to be a deliberate narrative strategy meant to convey the chaos of life and distortions of memory ... Although Moonglow grows overly discursive at times, it is never less than compelling when it sticks to the tale of Mike’s grandparents.
[Chabon's] most probing and substantial book yet ... Chabon’s maximalist prose style occasionally feels like overkill (not to mention a Yiddish vocabulary tutorial), but more often is integral to the rich fabric of the book ... Chabon nails the essence of how memory and denial can be intimately interwoven.
It works because Chabon writes with the aplomb of a test pilot. Maybe some of the swagger, too — there are a few spots where you can almost see the words smirking from the page, and I can see where that might annoy some people. I didn't mind, because he also proves his skill in every chapter. His war scenes are the stuff of thrillers. His understanding of the history of the space program would please any sci-fi fan. His love story is heartbreaking ... Chabon pulls it off, and you can't help but applaud.
Hardly a shade of human intrigue—or a pivotal moment in 20th-century history—goes unexplored in Chabon’s vibrant, sprawling latest. Inspired by his grandfather’s deathbed confessions, Moonglow is a feast for fans of the Pulitzer winner’s magical prose but less satisfying for lovers of linear narratives. Following its leaps can feel like trying to reassemble a scattered pack of cards; you’ll find all kinds of aces, but never quite the full deck.
And there is something contrived—Forrest Gumpish—in the way the character always gives Chabon an opportunity to introduce exciting factoids of 20th century history ... What elevates it all is the figure of Chabon’s grandmother, a charismatic manic depressive whose erratic behavior give[s] the book humanity ... this is a memoir about grandparents that so fully complicates the notion that their lives are the prepackaged, finished objects they always seem to be by the time we encounter them.
...pit[s] the streamlined grace of narrative against the chaos of lived experience ... There’s something tearstained about even the wildest flights of Chabonian fancy, as if each wondrous occurrence stood in for some feeling the writer couldn’t state outright. For his part, Chabon appears aware of this tendency to sublimate pain into fantasy ... A fevered and turbulent passage like this reveals just a fraction of Chabon’s range. He can be sardonic or sincere.
The novel is structured haphazardly as far as chronology goes, leaping from the grandfather’s wartime exploits to his marriage to a period in jail. These jumps in time could be discombobulating, but we recognise a deeper logic at work in their construction – memory, hunting in the dark for truths and affinities within the seeming randomness of a life ... The grandfather’s war is beautifully rendered. Just as Kavalier & Clay was both about the writing of superhero comics and a kind of superhero comic itself (albeit in prose form), here we have a rollicking story within a story full of doodlebugs and desperate raids that never descends into pastiche ... Moonglow is a book that seeks to challenge the primacy of facts, the reality fetishism that sees every film plastered with 'based on a true story' ... This is a novel that, despite its chronological lurches, feels entirely sure footed, propulsive, the work of a master at his very best. The brilliance of Moonglow stands as a strident defence of the form itself, a bravura demonstration of the endless mutability and versatility of the novel.
...the DNA of his storytelling is not only literary, it is literal. Moonglow relays the rich, complicated history of the author’s own family, reshaped through fiction ... This superb novel shows Chabon at his best; his documentary impulse here reins in the ornate language that can sometimes make his other work gaudy. He loses none of his audacious agency by harnessing his art to biography. But is Moonglow fundamentally a novel, or a memoir? Why quibble? As every novelist knows, it’s in fiction that the important truths get told.
...these stories, dozens of them chopped and scrambled, are bawdy and moving, violent and very funny ... Granted, some subplots seem self-indulgently baroque...But Chabon's narrative energies never flag ... a multitude of subplots command attention because they're so highly textured and because Chabon's language is so voluminous and vivid ... this is why you read Michael Chabon - for the self-deprecation and insight and brio all packed tight into sentences, fantastic stories and wild novels that you may think are a world away from where you live but always turn out to hit home.
... a playful twist on the family memoir ... The first half of Moonglow is propulsive; crazily vivid characters lurch into one gutsy, reckless venture after another. Scenes set in Germany during the chaotic last days of the war are especially powerful ... Chabon's novel doesn't so much run out of fuel as lose velocity. Sometimes, the problem is an overload of sidebar ballast — about model rocket construction, or theatrical performances at a psychiatric hospital. But a bigger problem is the taming of grandpa, whose understandable resolve to avoid trouble after his prison sentence defuses this wonderful firecracker long before he lands on his deathbed. Yet despite its occasional misfires, Moonglow is an often rollicking, ultimately moving read.
At first, the effect is disorienting and, dare I say, frustrating. Because Chabon barrels through by piling on anecdotes from different periods of Grandpa’s life without laying sufficient groundwork...Still, sticking with Grandpa’s Dilaudid-induced recollections is essential. As with any family history, the deeper you probe and the more patience you have to piece vignettes together, the more enthralling his story becomes ... by the end of the Moonglow, there are many holes purposely left unfilled...But isn’t that the point of storytelling? To leave some things open to the imagination and to interpretation? To leave your audience wanting more?
Whatever initial resistance we may have to the notion of dying Grandpa, high on Dilaudid, looking back on his long and colorful career is rapidly overcome by Chabon’s obvious pleasure in storytelling, by his gift for writing dialogue with the snap of a screwball comedy, and by his skill at making disparate elements of plot and character come together to reveal a design that owes something to both the Victorian and the magical-realist novel ... Repeatedly, the novel teeters on the edge of mawkishness, a brink from which it is mostly, if not always, pulled back by a smart line or exchange ... Ultimately what matters for the reader is that the grandfather is a terrific character: difficult, complex, admirable—at once unique and typical of a generation ... Audacious and accomplished, Moonglow is a four-hundred-page love letter to that generation, and one is thankful to Chabon for having brought one of those characters so vividly back to life.
...reads as the kind of axial work on which lengthy, rich careers rotate ... Chabon’s first-person precludes him from revealing the psychological interiority of his characters ... Chabon has hermetically sealed Moonglow. That isn’t to say the novel is bad—quite the opposite. Chabon marries the imminent and pleasurable readability of his Wonder Boys with a new formal maturity that lacks the cloying paeans to nerd culture that sometimes mar his Telegraph Avenue. The result is moving, dreamy, and deeply lucid, a book whose pages fall away as quickly as the eye can scan them ... Overly groomed, it feels sanitized—almost obsessively so. There are no missteps, nothing askew, nothing out of place. It’s too safe. And while that makes for an enjoyable—even compelling—read, it delimits the book’s effectiveness.
Chabon never names his fictional grandfather, or his fictional grandmother, but they are brought to vivid life through his grandfather's colorful stories ... The book has flaws. For one, another family's stories are never as interesting to outsiders as they are to loved ones. Moonglow lacks a sense of propulsive momentum for most of its first half ... Moonglow is, for long spans, a collection of stories that, while colorful, serve mostly to tell us a lot about a (fictional) person we don't know and a family we will never know ... That said, Chabon's writing is lovely, and some readers will enjoy it so much they will forgive the lack of propulsion in the story.
It’s a canny strategy, tapping the current penchant for 'auto-fiction,' but allowing for the free play of the author’s considerable gifts in the traditional storytelling mode ... Back and forth the narrative moves, prompted and interrupted by the narrator’s questions, between the dying grandfather and the account he is supposedly giving of his past, all rendered in richly novelistic detail ... Threaded through it all is the wonder of the universe, the dream of spaceflight that has forever animated and frustrated the grandfather.
...[an] intoxicating new novel ... Reading Moonglow feels like unpacking an old trunk packed with forgotten family heirlooms, each uniquely precious object held to the light where it glows with its own secret significance ... In less masterful hands, this pell-mell assortment of anecdotes and digressions might seem indulgent, but Chabon is a virtuoso storyteller who quickly allays any uncertainty about our destination by engaging us in an utterly captivating journey.
If the book is overstuffed with incident, it's still a moving family portrait and an entertaining trip through some of the 20th century's most significant events ... By now, you've probably figured out the main problem with Moonglow: Too much is going on ... feel[s] unfocused and heavily researched, as if Chabon learned so much interesting information about his subjects that he couldn't bear to leave any of it out. Yet Moonglow contains some of the most memorable scenes Chabon has ever written ... A reader in search of fiction that challenges its audience is better off with a flawed work such as Moonglow than with less daring fare.
...[a] delicious if not very straightforward novel ... The grandfather is a fantastic and complicated character: a genius and troublemaker, brooding logician, ethical brute, romantic, funny, macho, unquestioningly devoted to his difficult wife and daughter, both brilliant characters as well.
Chabon’s least linear, most fragmentary novel, achieving its considerable effects by means of an accumulation of layers of feeling rather than from any sense of one incident leading to another and another ... Moonglow is ingeniously constructed...gives Chabon and his narrator leeway to leaf at will through chapters of the grandfather’s life without feeling obligated to connect the dots.
Like Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, it finds wonder and awe in science amidst the brutality of war ... The energy of the novel takes the shape of a parabola of flight. It reaches its emotional high points halfway through and then gradually glides toward a soft landing. Reading it feels like listening to someone tell you about their life. The writing is magical—less manic, perhaps, than other books by Chabon. Its sentences are matter-of-fact but full of the gut-punch metaphors he’s famous for ... the less said about its genre, the better. What matters is that it’s utterly enchanting.
What we learn is painfully poignant. All in all, Moonglow is a fascinating, richly written ride through a territory that the author knows well. He should — he mostly made it up.
Moonglow is a marvel of melancholy enchantment, the story of one man's life seen, as its title suggests, through last lingering light before darkness. But it's as rich and strange as any dream ... In this novel, told in a voice droll and tender and sometimes dark, in language as lovely as its title, Chabon makes those secrets into riches for readers.
Jumping around in time with this story is like watching a street artist complete a scenic depiction: there is no full picture until the end, but what a masterpiece it turns out to be ... Characterizing his grandfather through his passions is a talent of Chabon’s, but sometimes this technique goes too far. There are long descriptions of rocket parts and bomb compositions, not to mention a Pynchon novel and several unnecessarily lengthy sections ... through its myriad cracked, sharp fragments of a life lived, Moonglow comes alive through vivid storytelling. This novel is at once the most imaginative and personal book Chabon has tackled yet.
Moonglow’s sweet, sad emotional core is packed into a very busy narrative ... With all this going on, the book could have been a mess, could have collapsed into a narrative muddle, but Chabon is very good at organizing stories. Despite the rapid timeline hopping, we’re never unanchored ... But at times the unrelenting spectacle can be hard to take seriously, because the tone is set to a kind of softhearted slapstick, a wholesome if superficial silliness that feels like 1950s television ... In broad strokes, then, the story is moving, engaging, even rollicking...But up close, it can feel schmaltzy and melodramatic.
...[a] captivating new novel ... Moonglow may be less showy than some of his earlier works, but Chabon manages to pull off a disappearing act while laying bare generations of secrets ... the 'mishmash' of Moonglow is definitely rich with meaning.
As Moonglow weaves its ambitious, romantic tragedy, Chabon’s writing is, as expected, graceful and witty and laced with melancholy. And by freeing himself from the rigidity of linear plot Chabon avoids the sometimes trying plotting that’s marked his previous novels. I can’t tell you if Moonglow’s specifics will resonate with you as strongly as they did for me, but I can suggest that the story’s broad strokes are applicable to, well, everybody.
Chabon’s playfulness emerges in passages in which the novelist’s art is held up to examination. No one can see the Skinless Horse that follows the narrator’s grandmother around, but in the novelist’s descriptions, we see it. The narrator’s mother, late on, opens a family album to find that the photographs have been removed; she gives a cry of despair and then proceeds to describe them anyway. For us, the photographs are there, as they would always have been, in words. The problem with Moonglow, however, is actually a shortage of playfulness. The book presents itself as a memoir, however implausible some episodes, and however neatly events are made to chime with what Chabon must know is publicly known about his real life. (A hat belonging to a real-life first wife surfaces late on). But memoirs have their own characteristic style and sound, and this book just doesn’t attempt it...It is beautifully and absorbingly written. But the inventive poetry of the writing is that of fiction, and not of the memoir it pretends to be ... It’s a handsome piece of work, but somehow leashed ... Sobriety doesn’t really suit him: the wonderful spliff-heavy rapture of Telegraph Avenue and the transvestite with the tuba in Wonder Boys are more representative of his unique contributions to American letters.
In the book’s disjointed, at times jarring narrative, Chabon gets to choose what sticks. But in real life, we aren’t so lucky ... in various settings, the book moves quicker, more efficiently, than Chabon’s earlier works. Every chapter reads like a self-contained episode that begs to be savored, not rushed. Grounded both in historical events and a universal search for purpose in one’s life, Chabon’s novel is a four-hundred page indulgence that invites us to seek meaning not in the destination but in the journey, even if that journey doesn’t seem to us to be particularly interesting.
The existence of this beautiful, brave book confirms that we must nevertheless continue constructing narratives, no matter how ephemeral they are. We cannot fully recover what’s been lost. But we can tell stories like this one, remembering where we came from so that we might somehow keep going.
...[a] moving, wry, thoroughly entertaining novel ... In his work, Chabon consistently shows unusual affection for his characters. They may be flawed individuals, but their virtues are bestowed generously and their difficulties are lightened by the author’s optimistic sympathy. Their lives do add up, as measured by ambition, courage and romantic and familial love.
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I never lost interest, possibly because, as I said, Chabon still knows how to tell a story. He knows what to do to keep a reader interested, unlike so many 'literary' authors who don’t seem to grasp the concept. I found myself enjoying the story and wanting to know more, even when the book ended. Whether the characters are real or fiction, he certainly got me interested and kept my attention. Heartily recommended.
Moonglow is gorgeously written and shaded with sadness, a story of recklessness, bravery and loss that spans the 20th century ... Harrowing in its depiction of war and deeply attuned to the double-edged legacies bequeathed by our elders, this is often a decidedly mournful book. There are funny moments, but Chabon mostly embraces the grief, plumbing it for answers to long-guarded family mysteries. Moonglow may not be cheery, but it’s often very powerful.
The deepest of Moonglow's many tricks is that it leaves the reader deeply reluctant to acknowledge how big a hole his exception makes room for. You so love the two grandparents that you have a stake in their literal existence ... Although some complain that Chabon garbles his narrative purpose with these diversions, I loved their casual-looking dazzle, reluctant to leave one thread behind and then instantly caught up in the next ... I remain profoundly grateful for his ability to create this book's engrossing, contradictory, faux-memoiristic reality. Art, such magical stuff is called. We're going to need it.
